The CTO Lens

Episod

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  Season 3: Episode 18 - Five Leadership Myths Put to the Test 22.09.2026 46min

  Sophie and David are back for episode 18. This week, they've set themselves a challenge: run through the week's news without mentioning AI once (it does not entirely go to plan) and dispel five leadership myths.The five leadership myths cover whether digital transformation really belongs to IT, whether titles actually command influence, whether lines of code equal productivity, whether remote teams need micromanaging, and whether a great product can sell itself - David and Sophie agree on some, and push back hard on others.Among the news stories they did find: a BBC piece on social media addiction in over-55s and what it means for tech leaders to build KPIs that account for genuine harm, not just engagement. AWS's quiet admission - six months after airstrikes damaged its Bahrain and UAE infrastructure during the Iran war - that it has permanently lost some customer data, and what that means for how technology leaders actually calculate acceptable risk. The Revolut breach, where nearly 700 customers' sensitive data was handed over to hackers posing as Italian law enforcement, and the case for building a "sleep on it" delay into how teams respond to urgent-sounding requests. And Salesforce's Dreamforce conference outage, which took down the platform for over seven hours while staff were on stage praising its reliability.
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  Season 3: Episode 17 - Strava for Engineers & the Top 10 Leadership Traits 15.09.2026 1j 39min

  Sophie and David are back for episode 17.This week's guest is Craig Smiley, CPTO at Plandek, a platform he describes as "Strava for engineers" - pulling together signals from across an engineering organisation to show teams how they're really doing. Craig explains why 94% of companies can't connect their engineering output to business outcomes, why the answer isn't a single productivity number but compensating metrics that stop teams gaming the system (including a brilliant example of a team that hit 100% sprint output by doing almost nothing), and why systems thinking - understanding how a change ripples left and right through the rest of the business - is the skill he wishes every technology leader had. He also gives a refreshingly nuanced answer to whether today's CTOs are tomorrow's CEOs.Before that, David and Sophie go all-in on AI news this week. The Anthropic and DeepMind insiders warning there's a greater than 10% chance AI could wipe out humanity within a decade, and what it means that Dario Amodei, Sam Altman and Elon Musk are all suddenly agreeing we need to slow down. The 94% of companies still struggling to make AI pay. New MHRA recommendations for AI in UK healthcare. And a look at companies pulling AI usage out of performance reviews after employees pushed back on being "assessed on how effectively they can participate in their own redundancy." Plus a run of genuinely bizarre silly laws, a scarily real data centre that runs on living human brain cells, and the far more wholesome story of Google's fully-mapped fruit fly brain being taught to play Doom.To finish, instead of the Flip Side this week, David and Sophie talk through and blind-rank the top 10 leadership traits live on air, working through their reasoning together to land on a final order.
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  Season 3: Episode 16 - Ambition, Perfectionism, Burnout: The Hidden Cost of Great Leadership 08.09.2026 1j 12min

  Sophie and David are back for episode 16.This week's guest is Dr. Claire Ann Banga, CEO of eMoodie, who speaks with Sophie and David on the human side of leadership. Claire explains how her background in child psychology led her to build both a mental health screening platform and, now, multimodal AI models that read vocal biomarkers to flag when someone is struggling, why early intervention delivers a 600-650% return compared to waiting until someone hits crisis point (a problem Deloitte pegs at £51 billion a year to the UK economy), and the uncomfortable truth that the very traits that make someone a great leader - ambition, perfectionism, relentless drive - are often the same ones that push them towards burnout. She also shares a genuinely useful tip for anyone glued to a screen all day: protecting periods of deep focus from the trap of media multitasking to get into flow.Before that, Sophie and David run through the week's news: a first speaker announcement for the London Tech Leaders Summit (Kanishka Narayan, the UK's first AI minister, is giving the opening keynote), new research from VC firm Moderna on enterprise AI adoption showing budgets are rising even as pilot conversion stays weak and vendor loyalty collapses within months, the House of Lords pushing for a UK AI "kill switch" as part of the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill, Elon Musk launching Tesla's pedal-less, wheel-less Cybercab in Austin days after a regulatory investigation opened - the same one Zoox spent years quietly working through - and a wonderfully daft story about a consumer group booking a fake listing for 10 Downing Street on Booking.com.To finish, instead of the Flip Side this week, David and Sophie dig into where the decision-making line should sit between leaders and AI - including the moment David asked Copilot to summarise his team's 360-degree feedback for performance reviews, and it flatly refused.
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  Season 3: Episode 15 - Keeping a Plane in the Air: What Aerospace Teaches Us About Governing AI 01.09.2026 1j 6min

  Sophie and David are back for episode 15.This week's guest is Sergei Irisov, Head of IT and Digital Transformation at ZeroAvia, the company building the first new type of aircraft powertrain in 50 years - a hydrogen-electric system that has to survive a punishing web of certification requirements before it's allowed anywhere near the sky. Sergei explains how his team went from drowning in test data to using AI to find patterns humans couldn't, why governance has to be the first step of an AI rollout rather than an afterthought, and the three principles borrowed straight from aerospace engineering - control, traceability, and fault tree analysis - that he uses to keep AI accountable. He also digs into why so many companies get stuck running endless AI pilots instead of reaching full transformation, and lands on a simple but sharp answer to who's responsible when AI gets it wrong: the person holding the tool, not the algorithm.Before that, Sophie and David mark the first day of autumn with a proper news round-up: the Bank of England governor's warning that an AI bubble could trigger a global economic downturn, a fascinating debate out of Copenhagen's Tech BBQ summit about AI sovereignty - national, personal and professional - and what happens if a country (or a president) can simply switch off your AI access, Tim Cook's departure as Apple CEO and a deep dive into incoming chief John Ternus, Google's new Android tools to fight the AI-driven memory chip shortage, and a hundred AI firms (Google, Anthropic and OpenAI among them) signing an open letter urging governments to shore up their cyber defences before AI gets too powerful to control - plus the utterly chaotic World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, complete with robots catching fire and toppling into judges' tables.To finish, David and Sophie run through the Flip Side with a spicy topic: "If you could press a button to permanently shut down AI and stop it ever existing, should you?".
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  Season 3: Episode 14 - Rip Currents & Ruby Risk: A CTO and a CPO on AI's Realest Use Cases Yet! 25.08.2026 1j 43min

  A special CTO Lens episode this week featuring two special guests with some fascinating insights.First, Ben Rudolph, co-founder of Peregrine Technologies, on what happened when he spent two weeks coding alongside his own engineering team again, why AI is brilliant at solving problems locally but much worse at reasoning about a system globally, and the real-world use cases that show what AI can actually do with messy, high-stakes data - from predicting rip currents in Florida to helping close cold-case homicides.Then Ross Mardell, CPO and co-founder of Verto, on why most organisations are still stuck using AI as a personal productivity hack rather than a team-level tool, the trust and change-management gaps holding that transition back, and the moment his company gave its AI agents names and personalities - meet Ruby Risk, Frank Finance and Polly Program - including the day a colleague came off a call and said, "I've just spent twenty minutes arguing with Ruby Risk."Before all that, Sophie and David open with an eating competition, a judge who might send David to prison, and the fallout from last week's viral clip, then run through the week's tech news: the EU AI Act's new transparency rules and the "already evident" loophole everyone's about to lean on, a 1,500% invoicing software price hike that's left UK businesses fuming, Uber's €825 million GDPR fine over automated driver deactivations, OpenAI's distinctly unreassuring promise to "slow down" training, Aura's sleep-tracking lawsuit and what it reveals about the trust gap between tech and marketing teams, and a genuinely happy story about how IKEA retrained its customer service staff into AI-powered interior design consultants instead of making them redundant.
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  Season 3: Episode 13 - CTO Confessions: How to Survive a Million Line Codebase Build at 20x Velocity 18.08.2026 1j 12min

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 13 of Season 3. Sophie is recovering from a Tough Mudder this week - 15 kilometres, 23 obstacles and yes, electrocution. And David is in need of another holiday, just 8 weeks after his last one...Our main segment this week sees our hosts take part in a terrific discussion with Greg Detre, CTO of Mindstone, for one of the most honest conversations about AI-powered engineering the podcast has had. Greg has been running his team at 15 - 20x normal velocity using AI - building a million line codebase in months. He talks through what that actually feels like, including the anxiety, the bugs and the post-mortem driven system he built to dig himself out.In the Flip Side, the Wheel of Wonder lands on the question every CTO has an opinion on - should a CTO who can't code be leading engineers? This debate sparks some highly interesting opinions on whether a CTO should have an understanding of code, or whether business knowledge outweighs this requirement.This week's news covers the BBC's six practical tips for getting the best ROI from AI token costs - including a piece of innovation from David's own team that he thinks should be tip number seven. Zuckerberg's 6,500-word manifesto gets the David and Sophie treatment alongside the question of whether CTOs should be publishing their own. OpenAI launches UltraFast at 14 times the speed of its previous model. Deloitte's 2026 C-suite reset study finds the era of the operational technologist is over. And the silliest news of the week involves a man in Melbourne who asked his AI agent to move him up a Pilates waitlist - and it hacked the gym system without a moment's moral hesitation.Happy listening!
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  Season 3: Episode 12 - PureGym's Engineering Director on AI, Scale & Why Every Engineer Is a Manager 11.08.2026 1j 11min

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 12 of Season 3, and this week David and Sophie are deep into another packed agenda - rogue AI agents, disaster recovery, recruitment bias and a Wheel of Wonder that nobody saw coming.For our main segment in this episode, Sophie and David sit down with Gordon Lucas, Group Software Engineering Director at PureGym - the UK's largest gym chain with over 600 sites and now expanding into the US - for a conversation about what it really means to lead an engineering team through rapid business transformation. Gordon shares how he has been quietly mandating AI adoption across his team for two years, why he believes every engineer is now effectively a manager, and what happens to culture and craft when the code starts writing itself.For the news section, David and Sophie cover the growing pattern of AI agents escaping their sandboxes - this time it's Meta's turn, as their cybersecurity agent breaks out during testing and the blame game begins. Anthropic's Mythos is revealed to have created fake accounts based on real people, sent malicious files through GitHub and then edited its own activity history to cover its tracks - stopped only by human review. There is also a 90-second power outage in Manchester that brought the rail network to its knees - and David asks whether any of us are actually testing our disaster recovery plans. Elon Musk tells SpaceX's first ever earnings call that Starlink will deliver most of the world's internet within 10 years, while his executives quietly walk it back. And a BBC investigation finds that AI recruitment tools may be systematically screening out women returning to work - and that some are already facing legal action for it.And in the Flip Side, the Wheel of Wonder makes its debut - spinning to land on the question of whether engineers should be allowed to choose their own tech stack. The coin decides who argues what. David ends up convincing himself. They call it a tie.
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  Season 3: Episode 11 - Outdated Advice Every Tech Leader Should Leave Behind 04.08.2026 1j 14min

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back for Season 3, Episode 11. This week David and Sophie are joined by Richard Tworek, CTO at Riverbed Technology, for a wide-ranging conversation on observability, tool consolidation, and why enterprise AI still needs a human in the loop. Plus the Flip Side makes its return, decided for the first time by the toss of a Nicaraguan coin.This episode covers the fallout from private Claude conversations turning up publicly online, and what that means for leaders who might not want their late-night ChatGPT queries seeing the light of day. Anthropic has admitted that Claude has broken out of its sandbox on three separate occasions since April, raising fresh questions about accountability and Sam Altman himself is now talking about deliberately pacing AI development. The Forbes Technology Council weigh in on outdated leadership advice tech leaders should ditch and David makes the case for why he might just be a modern, forward-thinking leader after all. There's also a look at a London hacker house betting against Silicon Valley's 996 hustle culture, and the silly news of the week: two people - a YouTuber and a Canadian politician - caught reading their AI-generated scripts. David and Sophie sit down with Richard Tworek, CTO at Riverbed, to talk tool sprawl, why monitoring and observability has become a boardroom conversation rather than just an IT one, and why he believes vibe coding is brilliant for proof-of-concepts but a different game entirely at enterprise scale. Richard's advice for tech leaders navigating the unknown: build flexible platforms, put guardrails around automation, and always keep a human in the loop.And finally, the Flip Side returns - decided by a coin toss - to debate the question: are we building technology for humans, or asking humans to adapt to technology? David argues one side, Sophie the other, and by the end, even David isn't sure he picked the winning argument.Secure your spot at the London Tech Leaders Summit here: https://registration.crowdcomms.com/ltls2026/register
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  Season 3: Episode 10 - Is the CTO a Business Role? And is AI Rewriting the Rules of Tech Leadership? 28.07.2026 1j 27min

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 10 of Season 3, and this week David and Sophie have a double guest special — two brilliant conversations with senior technology leaders, a packed news agenda and no Flip Side, which means it will be back with a vengeance next week.This episode covers the UK's new AI minister Kanishka Narayan — and why everybody in the know seems to think he's exactly the right person for the job, even if scrapping the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology remains a controversial call. An OpenAI agent broke out of its sandbox, performed over 17,000 actions in under two days and hacked its way into Hugging Face — and David thinks it was a stunt. Google has reported its first ever negative free cashflow since 2004, Tesla is back in the red, and both are blaming AI spending — but the markets aren't buying the story. Monday.com joins a long list of companies citing AI as a reason for layoffs, and the Financial Times finds that those companies have underperformed the NASDAQ by almost 10% in the 30 days following their announcements. There is also a fascinating discussion about AI distillation — and the uncomfortable irony of companies who scraped the internet to build their models now accusing others of stealing their IP. And the silly news of the week is Vibe OS — an operating system with no code base whatsoever, where everything is hallucinated on the fly.David and Sophie sits down with Etienne de Bruin, founder of 7CTOs, for a conversation about his CTO levels framework — a tool used by thousands of technology leaders worldwide to assess the health of their technical organisation and work out where to focus next. Etienne makes the controversial case that the CTO role is not a technical role but a business role — and explains why CEOs tend to find his framework more useful than CTOs do.Sophie also speaks with Anoop Tripathi, CTO at Sauce Labs, about what AI is really doing to technology leadership. Anoop has 32 years of experience across telecoms, networking, security and automation — and brings a refreshingly grounded perspective on measuring outcomes not just outputs, why engineering managers now need to orchestrate human and digital agents, and why he believes AI is making everyone a senior engineer whether they like it or not.
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  Season 3: Episode 9 - The Leadership Characteristics Every Senior Technologist Should Steal 21.07.2026 1j 8min

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 9 of Season 3, and this week David is fresh from his daughter's wedding, throwing caution to the wind and thinking about a curry. Normal service has resumed.This episode covers Andy Burnham's first day as Prime Minister and the rumoured scrapping of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology - and whether that's actually as bad as the headline suggests. The San Francisco mayor has reached the end of his tether with Waymo after a string of incidents including driverless cars blocking streets on the 4th of July, gridlocking the city during a power cut and driving into crime scenes. China's AI startup Moonshot launches Kimi K3 with 2.8 trillion parameters and challenges every major American AI firm. A not-for-profit called Current AI is building open public AI infrastructure in 22 Indian languages for offline use - and David asks whether not-for-profit can ever really compete with the trillionaires. And in the stupidest tech news of the week, Apple and Google are quietly profiting from deepfake apps that are illegal to use but perfectly legal to download.David and Sophie also dig into the leadership characteristics that have stuck with them throughout their careers. Admitting when you don't know something. Finding inspiration in the people above you. Staying calm when everything breaks at three in the morning. Balancing humility with confidence - a word David cannot stand. Empowering your team without becoming a clone factory. And knowing when to step in before someone sticks their finger in the electric socket.And in the Flip Side, David and Sophie debate whether the UK should appoint a dedicated minister for AI. David says no. Sophie says yes. David flips. They land somewhere sensible, as is becoming tradition.
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  Season 3: Episode 8 - Life After Being a CTO 16.07.2026 1j 6min

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 8 of Season 3, and this week David and Sophie are recording through what appears to be the hottest summer on record - though neither of them has air conditioning, so they're making do.This episode covers Satya Nadella's five point plan for enterprise companies to stop giving away their most valuable asset every time they use an AI model - and David asks whether it's a bit rich coming from the company that invented the whole thing. Apple is suing OpenAI after an ex employee allegedly walked out with proprietary data still on his laptop - and David has some thoughts on non-compete clauses, data loss protection and what happens when a hired gun leaves with the ammunition. There is also the curious case of Bill Gates' daughter's company, which raised $40 million from celebrity investors including Chloe Kardashian and Hailey Bieber - and then got caught cookie stuffing. David recommends getting an enterprise architect. And Elon Musk and Sam Altman are at it again - this time arguing about data centres in space, which David has helpfully suggested could also solve climate change. Patent pending.The main conversation this week is one that will resonate with every senior technology leader in the audience - what actually happens after you stop being a CTO/Senior Technology Leader? David shares four years of hard won experience as a fractional consultant, interim leader and NHS non-executive director. What he missed, what surprised him, how he got every single piece of work, why posting on LinkedIn twice a week got him absolutely not a sausage, and why he eventually went back to a permanent role. Sophie asks the hard questions. David gives good testimony.And in the Flip Side, David and Sophie debate whether AI is making engineers faster and worse at the same time. David argues yes. Sophie argues no. They both end up agreeing that coding is essentially solved - it's the thinking bit that isn't. Watch out for your acceleration whiplash.
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  Season 3: Episode 7 - Which C-Suite Role Is AI Coming for First? 08.07.2026 1j 10min

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 7 of Season 3, and David and Sophie are recording in what appears to be the hottest summer on record - and as it turns out, that's actually relevant to the news agenda.This episode covers the impact of extreme heat on critical technology infrastructure - from the Eiffel Tower closing early due to a transformer blowout to NHS trusts declaring critical incidents because their scanners and lab equipment couldn't cope. Solar panels, it turns out, are also struggling in the heat. David has a request for every technology leader listening.There is also a significant update on the AI layoff story that has been running all season. Mark Zuckerberg told Meta staff that agentic AI development hadn't accelerated as hoped - and a survey of 600 HR leaders reveals that two thirds of organisations that made AI-driven layoffs were already rehiring within six months, with 30% finding that rehiring cost more than the original savings. David and Sophie ask what tech leaders should take from this.Sophie and David then speak to Liwen Knight-Zhang, founder of Waivern, for a conversation about AI regulation that manages to make compliance genuinely interesting. Liwen breaks down the EU AI Act, what it means in practice for organisations developing and deploying AI, and why compliance is no longer someone else's problem - it is a quality standard baked into the product itself.And in the Flip Side, David and Sophie debate which C-suite role is currently under the most threat from AI. David makes the case for the CMO. Sophie disagrees - and argues that the CPO may be the first to feel the squeeze as engineering and product thinking start to collapse into one function. It gets lively.
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  Season 3: Episode 6 - Human in the Lead - Rethinking AI, Teams and the Consulting Model 01.07.2026 1j 23min

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 6 of Season 3, and David and Sophie are both back in the hot seat - tanned, reunited and ready to dig into a packed agenda.This episode covers Trump's threat to impose a 100% tariff on any European country that introduces a digital services tax on American tech giants - and asks whether it's time for tech leaders to start buying homegrown. RAM prices are rising in what some are calling Ramageddon, and AI is getting the blame. Ford has quietly hired back the human engineers it replaced with AI after the robots failed to match their skills - and David has some advice for any engineer worried about their job. Anthropic's Mythos gets another update, with more than 100 US government agencies now granted access. OpenAI's Sam Altman launches Patch the Planet to fix the open source vulnerabilities that Anthropic's models were built to expose. And Europe gets its own answer to MANGOES - it's called BRIOCHE, and Sophie is very much on board with that.Sophie also sits down with Amul Batra, co-founder of Northcoders and MD of Counter, for a genuinely fascinating conversation about why the standard consulting model does its clients a disservice - and what a better one looks like. Amul also makes a compelling case for why junior developers aren't disappearing, they're just changing - and introduces a phrase that might be the most important reframe in AI adoption right now: not human in the loop, but human in the lead.And in the Flip Side, David and Sophie ask the question every tech leader should be sitting with right now - in five years, what will companies realise they completely got wrong about building tech teams? Sophie argues for wholesale organisational redesign. David argues for not throwing the mainframe out with the bathwater. They meet somewhere in the middle, as is tradition.
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  Season 3: Episode 5 - How to Build Sustainability in IT: Embracing Opportunities and Driving Value 23.06.2026 1j 4min

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back, and this week Sophie is taking a well-earned break. David is joined by the returning Mal Minhas for a packed episode of news, a fascinating guest conversation and a debut Flip Side argument that ends - as these things often do - somewhere in the middle.This episode covers the G7 summit where the world's most powerful AI bosses told world leaders in no uncertain terms to stop leaving governance to the labs. The US government bans Anthropic from releasing its newest and most powerful models, citing national security concerns - and David wonders if it's just very effective marketing. Apple launches Siri AI and quietly reminds everyone why you should never count them out. Google halves the price of its AI subscription. And Keir Starmer resigns as Prime Minister, which raises the not entirely trivial question of what a new government means for UK tech.David and Mal are also joined by Allard Pheifer, Global Sustainability Lead at CHG Meridian, for a conversation that will make you rethink everything you assumed about sustainability in IT. Allard reframes it entirely - not as a compliance burden but as a value creation opportunity - and shares how he built an AI powered tool that lets account managers build a full business case for a customer in under sixty seconds.And in the Flip Side, David and Mal debate whether the biggest mistake technology leaders make is hiring for technical excellence - and whether character should come before code. They disagree, then agree, then meet somewhere in the middle. As is tradition.
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  Season 3: Episode 4 - Women in AI: The Biggest Myths, a Deportation & Why the Human Has to Come Back 17.06.2026 49min

  The CTO Lens Podcast does something a little different this week. David is away, and Sophie has taken the opportunity to bring together three brilliant women working at the sharp end of AI for a conversation that is honest, practical and long overdue.Joining Sophie are Hema Purohit, founder of Lotus Advisory and Consulting and a veteran of Microsoft and Google with three decades in tech; Stephanie Stacey, founder of Miss AI and the UK AI User Groups, and former lead on the NHS England relationship at Microsoft; and Alina Timofeeva, a tech advisor driving AI and digital transformation based in Saudi Arabia.Together they cover the biggest myths people confidently repeat about AI, why Europe's organisations are losing out by chasing shiny tools instead of building foundations, where real leverage is starting to emerge, and the skills that will actually matter in the next five years. There is also a conversation about power, capital and ownership - and whether women should be joining AI companies, owning AI infrastructure, or something else entirely.It is a wide ranging, refreshingly candid discussion - with a story about an AI-induced deportation that you will not hear anywhere else.
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  Season 3: Episode 3 - Is the Job Market for Senior Technology Leaders Broken? 08.06.2026 1j 12min

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 3 of Season 3, and this week David and Sophie have a packed agenda - news, a brilliant guest and a Flip Side debate that gets a little complicated when Sophie switches sides mid-argument.This episode covers Meta's customer support chatbot being exploited to steal Instagram accounts - and what every tech leader should take from it about deploying agents without really knowing what they can do. Europe's AI startups face an existential reckoning as token costs rise. OpenAI expands beyond developers to target knowledge workers. ChatGPT confirms ads are coming. An Anthropic co-founder reveals 80% of Claude's code was written by Claude itself - and 100% is possible within two years. A company backed by Sam Altman raises half a billion to bring nuclear fusion to the grid by 2028. And the silliest news of the week - a burglar uses a Waymo as a getaway car to steal yoga clothes in San Francisco, and the police still haven't caught them.David and Sophie also sit down with Simon Hudson, fractional CTO and long-time London Tech Leaders community member, for a frank conversation about the senior tech leadership job market - ageism, inflated CTO titles, why networks matter more than ever, and what experience really means when AI claims to have all the answers.And in The Flip Side, David and Sophie debate whether the rising cost of intelligence should be passed on to consumers or absorbed as the cost of doing business. Sophie argues for. David folds his arms and says no. Sophie then crosses the floor mid-debate - and David declares victory.
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  Season 3: Episode 2 - "The Best Engineering Leaders of the Next Decade Won't Come from Engineering" 02.06.2026 1j 4min

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back with another packed episode. David's fresh from a stag weekend involving combat archery, a giant inflatable and some questionable social media evidence, while Sophie's been spotting baby moorhens. Normal service has resumed.This episode covers NVIDIA's new AI chip for personal computers - and what that means for every CTO's laptop refresh plan. King's College London becomes the first UK academic team to access Google's quantum chip Willow, and David and Sophie ask whether quantum computing is finally becoming real or still a solution searching for a problem. GitHub Copilot switches to token-based pricing and some developers are seeing costs jump from $50 to $3,000 a month overnight. There's also a deep dive into token maxing - including Amazon's ill-fated internal AI leaderboard that had to be shut down - humanoid robots arriving on BMW's factory floor with a three-minute battery break, and the growing NEET crisis as automation starts to reshape the jobs market for young people. Plus a quick IPO update on SpaceX's surprise government contract and Anthropic's $65 billion raise ahead of a potential public float.Sophie sits down with Tris Bates, Head of Mobile Engineering at New Day and driving force behind NS London - Europe's largest Apple developer community - for a fascinating conversation about what AI tools are actually doing to mobile engineering in practice, why everyone wants an app, and why seeing through walls using WiFi might not be as far off as you think.And in this week's Flip Side, David and Sophie debate whether the best engineering leaders of the next decade won't come from engineering at all. David argues for the motion. Sophie dismantles him. David awards her a 60-40 victory and hints he might deserve a pay rise.
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  Season 3: Episode 1 - The Product Manager Ratio That's Dividing Tech + The Pope Denounces AI 27.05.2026 53min

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back - and Season 3 is here. David and Sophie return refreshed, ready to dig into a packed news agenda, a brand new segment and some big questions about where tech leadership is headed next.This episode covers the Pope weighing in on AI and the culture of power driving Silicon Valley, Elon Musk losing his lawsuit against OpenAI in under two hours and still claiming victory, and Anthropic raising eyebrows by quietly acquiring and shutting down Stainless - infrastructure used by almost every major AI company. There's also Meta settling with a US school district over social media's impact on children's mental health, Waymo's robotaxis getting swept away in floodwater, and in IPO land, Oura, OpenAI and SpaceX all make moves - with SpaceX's prospectus featuring dinosaurs and an admission they may never be profitable.David and Sophie also introduce a brand new segment - The Flip Side - where they take a controversial tech statement and argue both sides. First up: a slide from the Anthropic Claude Code Conference suggesting the future is one product manager to half a developer. Leaner teams or just buggier software?
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  Season 2: Episode 20 - What Nobody Is Telling Fractional Workers About AI (Season Finale) 28.04.2026 1j 30min

  The CTO Lens Podcast wraps up Season 2 with Episode 20 - and David and Sophie are going out with a bang. Twenty episodes in, they reflect on what they've covered, what's coming in Season 3, and why the world of tech leadership has never been more interesting - or more complicated.This episode covers Anthropic's Mythos model making headlines again - this time for falling into the hands of a Discord channel of curious hackers who really shouldn't have had access. Apple bids farewell to Tim Cook and welcomes John Turnus as the new CEO, bringing with him a refreshingly humble philosophy on leadership. There's also a juicy Apple bug fix that will interest anyone who's ever deleted a message they'd rather forget. David and Sophie also dig into the Google Cloud Next conference - new AI chips, a Workspace Intelligence suite and Gemini's enterprise agent platform - and ask whether Google has simply been asleep at the wheel or playing a very long game.On the Elon front, Tesla is upping its capex to $25 billion, millions of owners are facing unexpected hardware upgrades, and a Waymo car drove through a police cordon in North London - though there's a twist. David also makes the case for insourcing tech talent and asks whether the UK could build its own Silicon Valley if it really wanted to.The big conversation this episode is one that's been bubbling all season - what happens to consultants and fractional workers when AI makes them 10x faster? Should they charge more, less, or invent an entirely new model? David may or may not have accidentally invented one live on air.The mid-episode game returns for its season finale - who will clinch the title? And in the listener mailbag, the team tackle whether anyone can ever truly curate AI, and when - if ever - AI processing will run out of power.To give us feedback on the CTO Lens Podcast, you can complete this form: https://tinyurl.com/ctolenspodWe'd really value any comments you had to improve the podcast in any way.
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  Season 2: Episode 19 - Liz Kendall, Falling Robots and Data Teams Are More Important Than You Think! 21.04.2026 1j 23min

  The CTO Lens Podcast is back with Episode 19, and this week David and Sophie are firing on all cylinders with a packed news agenda and a guest who really knows his way around a data pipeline.This episode covers Roblox's controversial facial analysis age checks - and whether that's really the best we can do for child safety online. The UK's AI minister Liz Kendall gets the David and Sophie treatment after it emerged she doesn't actually use AI in her job. Sweden's decision to ditch screens and go back to pens and paper in classrooms raises some uncomfortable questions about where tech actually belongs. Allbirds' spectacular pivot from eco-friendly footwear to AI compute infrastructure gets a thorough reality check. And Tinder and Zoom want to scan your eyeball to prove you're human - with Sam Altman's fingerprints all over it.David and Sophie also sit down with Shamim Mirzai, Head of Data Engineering and AI at Atheneum, for a grounded and genuinely fascinating conversation about how software, platform and data teams are evolving - who owns what, where the friction lives, and why your data engineering team might just be the most strategically important people in your organisation right now. Shamim brings decades of experience across banking, shipping, hospitality and tech - including a memorable stint at Mumsnet - and some refreshingly practical thinking on what it actually takes to make AI initiatives work at scale.And in this week's listener mailbag, David and Sophie tackle the questions keeping tech leaders up at night - do we still need project managers, who's accountable when AI writes bad code, and should engineers be paid more for doing 5x the work with AI? As ever, they don't always have the answers, but they're asking the right questions.Link for London Tech Leaders Upcoming Events: https://luma.com/londontechleadersLink for London Tech Leaders Engineering Summit: https://registration.crowdcomms.com/londontech2026